Cabinet's quandary: Explaining sequester cuts

The Washington Post’s fact-check column followed up by giving the White House’s vaccine claims a grade of two Pinocchios.

Dale Moore, public policy director at the American Farm Bureau and a former Agriculture Department chief of staff from the George W. Bush administration, said Obama’s Cabinet appears as if it lacks guidance on how to put the spending cuts into practice.

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“They’ve been pretty consistent in highlighting the potential scary parts,” he said. “But in terms of how they plan to implement the cuts, in a technical sense, it’s something that’s still evolving.”

Budget experts say the data dribble also comes because Congress hasn’t finished negotiations on a continuing resolution that could change the underlying baselines that determine just how much money gets cuts in every department. The House passed a stopgap spending bill last week that delivered an additional $7 billion to the Pentagon, and Senate Democrats are expected to move their own bill this week that raises spending levels for Justice, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Commerce, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Sequestration itself is also an unwieldy process. Some departments and programs are exempt, like Veterans Affairs and active-duty service members’ paychecks. Agency heads under the 2011 law are also prohibited from shifting money from one program, project or account into another. Personnel-heavy departments are trying to meet the budget requirements with furloughs, though collective bargaining with union officials in many cases still isn’t finished.

Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director at the House Appropriations Committee, said Obama’s White House aides don’t “realize how hard this is.”

“This is such a massive thing that it takes a long time to communicate it and make people understand what it is and why it’s happening and where it came from,” Lilly said. “They’re not invested in that.”

Lilly said Cabinet departments are struggling to reach the right tone on sequestration after the White House took heat from Republicans over the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision to release several hundred immigrants from deportation centers around the country.

“If you’re at the Commerce Department and play a role in the fishery budget, if the decision is made to cut back the halibut season, you want somebody else to make the announcement,” Lilly said.

Gordon Adams, a defense expert and former White House budget staffer who handled the Pentagon portfolio, said Obama’s Cabinet was “unleashed rather late, pretty much to go over the heads of Congress, to go to the American people to get them to come back and say, ‘Stop this thing.’”

But Adams said the strategy has backfired. “Domestic departments have never been as good at hyperbole or strategy as the Defense Department ever,” he said. “I’m sure that’s part of it.”